Jenkins Migration FAQ

What's happening?

Projects hosted at the Eclipse Foundation will soon benefit from a brand new continuous integration (CI) infrastructure. Expected improvements are: resiliency, scalability and nimbleness. We are doing this move with tremendous support from our friends at RedHat with their product OpenShift Container Platform.

Why are you doing this?

We need to

scale up our current JIPP infrastructure, and make it more efficient

utilize our hardware better and be able to add interim cloud resources when needed

be able to limit a project's resource consumption and isolate it from other projects

be able to update Jenkins masters and to install/update Jenkins plugins in batch

provide more flexibility to projects to let them build their code in containers so that they control the build environment

have built-in resilience. Jenkins on OpenShift provide this, by leveraging technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes.

If your project used a RAM disk on the old infra (when in doubt, you probably did not), you will need to adjust your build config accordingly. RAM disks might be added again later on, but this has a very low priority.

How do I run UI-tests on the new infra?

To ease the migration/transition, we provide a basic UI-test pod template that can be used with freestyle jobs. This image only provides a minimal UI test environment. If your project requires specific dependencies, in most cases, you will need to roll your own.

The basic UI-test pod template has the label "ui-test" that can be specified in the job configuration under "Restrict where this project can be run".

Migration pod templateIn case the ui-test image does not work for you, you can try the "migration" pod template that should be close(r) to the environment on the old infra. Please note: this should only used during the migration and be replaced with leaner docker images eventually.

What’s the plan?

Starting in February 2019, all new projects will get an instance on the new infrastructure instead of the old infrastructure. In the meantime, we will start migrating existing JIPPs by reaching out to projects to tell them when the migration will happen and see if it fits with their release agenda. There is no set timeline, but we aim to ramp up pretty quickly and do the migration as fast as we can.

The migration itself will happen in two steps. First, we will create an instance on the new infrastructure with the URL https://ci-staging.eclipse.org/<project_name> and migrate existing build jobs to it. The current instance on the old infra will stay as is at the URL https://ci.eclipse.org/<project_name>. Once the project will have confirmed that the new instance behavior is correct, we will remove the old instance and will make the new instance available at the original URL https://ci.eclipse.org/<project_name>. This process should cause only slight disruptions for contributors and projects users.

What is happening to instances already hosted on CloudBees Core / Jenkins Enterprise?

Those instances (especially EE4J instances) already run inside the cluster and will stay as is at least until we finish the migration of Jenkins instances from the current infrastructure to the new one.

Can we keep the JIPP on the old infra (not all of our builds are working yet on the new infra)?

We are moving the JIPPs off the old infra to free up the physical machines (hipp1-10) so we can add the compute power to the cluster. Therefore, we can't keep the old JIPPs around. The projects will have a reasonable amount of time for the migration. We'll support the projects during the migration and try to consider release schedules.

Will the new CI infrastructure also support different platforms (e.g. Windows or Mac)?

Yes, we will try to integrate existing and new (cloud hosted) Windows and Mac machines.

Will external/remote slaves still be supported?

Yes, they will be supported.

Will it be possible to trigger jobs on events (like GitHub pull requests)?

This is already working in the current environment with the help of the GitHub pull request plugin and will continue to be working on the new infrastructure.

Will builds be faster?

As mentioned above, we are aiming to better utilize our existing hardware, add additional (cloud based) resources and isolate resource consumption. This should improve the build times in general.

Will long-running UI tests be faster?

More flexible build agents should speed things up. We will also have better monitoring to identify potential bottle-necks. Jenkins Pipelines also make it easier to set up tests in parallel.